Home Ground is a photographic archive of Mitcham, made by the young people who live in it. Over eight weeks in the summer of 2026, a small group aged thirteen to nineteen were given film cameras, dictaphones, and a single instruction: document the place you call your own. What they made is here. Their Mitcham, in their own images and their own words.

I applied for this grant with a conviction that felt almost too simple to say out loud: that young people are not only the audience for heritage, but they also have the right to be its authors. Heritage tends to get spoken about as something finished — preserved, protected, kept behind glass, inherited from the people who came before. Home Ground quietly argues with that. It treats heritage as something still being made, right now, in the everyday places these young people move through: the bus stop, the chicken shop, the barber's, the corners of Mitcham they'd call their own.

The first session began with an empty room and a few young people who had drifted in for the snacks. Rather than perform at them, I offered a choice at the break — stay only if you want to be part of this, no obligation to remain. Four stayed. That single act of handing over the decision set the ethic for everything that followed. This was going to be their project, or it was going to be nothing.

We didn't pick up cameras straight away. The work moved in order — from a word, to writing, to voice, and only then to image. Andre Anderson led an early session around three words, change, community and courage, and one of the group wrote down a thought they said they had never written before, something that hadn't fully formed until it was on the page. Another went and bought a journal of their own that week. Nothing had been photographed yet, and the project was already doing what I had hoped it might.

Then I gave them one word — Mitcham — and asked what it meant to them, and what they loved about it. They named their own places, recorded their own voices, and heard themselves played back for the first time. There is a particular quiet that comes over a room when a young person hears their own voice describing home. These are the voices that don't usually make it into the archive.

None of this group arrived through photography. They came from gaming, from music, from drill. Rather than treat that as a gap to be corrected, we used it as the way in: the visual language of a music release, the craft behind an image, photography as a way of telling — in one of their own phrases — "the stories normal people don't see." I have thought many times since that this could be the title of the whole show.

What they have made is a record that did not exist before. Not a heritage of monuments and dates, but of a Thursday afternoon, a familiar street, a face across a table in a chicken shop chosen together. Years from now, someone will look at this work and understand something true about who was in Mitcham in 2026, and what mattered to them. That is the entire point.

In September, the work comes home. It went up across Mitcham Town Centre — in the exhibition space and on large-scale banners over the market — so that the people who move through this town every day meet it where they live. The young people who made it will see their own images at the scale of the place itself. Their Mitcham, given back to Mitcham.